Any Given Wednesday, Part I
Recovered: 03.10.2006
I wasn't so much worried about the tuna as I was the pork rib. This was unusual given the relatively uncooked nature of the Ahi, but the pork tenderloin had been in the refrigerator for twice as long, and it brought me back to a Bad Experience from several years ago which involved a bucket and a commode used in tandem for the better part of a day. Oh...that devil Pork.
"Hell with it." I ate them both.
The meal before had been twelve hours prior, and its memory brought a smile. I had been sitting across from two Destroyer Classes, and they were laughing. It was cold enough outside to freeze shallow puddles of water, but they sat in short sleeves with tiny beads of sweat forming across their shaved heads; Destroyers ran hot, and they tended to be miserable in even average room temperatures.
We rarely had a chance to dine with one another as a team, and spirits were high. There was a Fast Attack sitting to my left, and a well-liked supervisor across from us--a Fast Attack Class himself. These were the most common now, a sign of changing budget and political climates in which the smaller, faster models were more cost effective and Politically Correct. They were numerous and lithe--they could engage from long range, and had high energy levels. Their drawbacks however were their difficulty in subduing what they caught, and they had wildly short attention spans--but they couldn't do much damage to their customers, and the Administrators liked this. The Destroyers on the other hand weren't as effective from a distance, but when they were close they were both as effective at stopping a situation before it started as they were at ending it in a Precedent Setting splash of blood and bone. Because of their more plodding nature and metabolism, they also made the best investigators...but they were a dwindling breed, once hired in great numbers for their ability to solve problems with a ham-sized fist, and now avoided because of this same thing. It was a cyclical hiring cycle, and we were on the downward trend of the Heavies, and it made me sad. They were magnificent to see at work, as is any force of nature.
I myself was a Cruiser Class, and we all worked well together in any combination. The Destroyers ranged from 300 to 400 lbs., Cruisers in the 200 range, and the Fast Attacks went from 140 to 180 tops. Cruisers were plentiful as well, and while they weren't as expert as the opposite ends of the spectrum, they were proficient at both and thus worked well with either.
We sat and ate and laughed, until a silence befell us as we watched the cook being escorted down the aisle past us towards the bathroom, shivering and sweating with fever. We looked from our empty plates to the cook, and back again; a price of eating in Eden. We departed.
The next call for service was at a local Roach Motel directly off the Boulevard of Broken Dreams; a vagrant had kicked in a door to find a warm shelter for the night for himself and his dog. He was passive, and we all sat around trying to figure out what to do with him. It wasn't a residential burglary because it was unoccupied, but it wasn't quite criminal trespass either. There was vandalism, sure, but the owner wasn't eager to leave the desk to sign for misdemeanor warrants. As we sat and debated the finer parts of law, the mans starving dog strolled across the room to the kitchen dinette where it sniffed a pile of its own feces deposited hours earlier, and began to swallow it down for lack of any other sustenance at the moment. The indigent man called out the emaciated dogs name to distract it from its crude meal, and at the sound of its name we silently agreed to let them both go and prepare for the next call--no good possibly coming from this.
The dog's name, of course, was "Lucky".
The day rolled on, wrecks, reports, revulsion, the usual. Two o’clock was approaching though, and it was time to start mapping out the remainder of the shift to avoid a Late Call. It was as much a part of the job as stomach lining deficiencies, but just as difficult to ignore. My partner had landed a child rape so I decided to help him. Between the two of us, we’d be out on time, or at least one of us would.
The divorce was going poorly. Oh—they hadn’t been married, but it’s an abstract thought in these geographies. The father was staying across the state line in Ringgold with his new package family and had dropped the daughter off back in Eden with the Baby’s Momma, and Momma had decided that the two year old had been molested somehow. She was unable to articulate how she felt this, but was convinced nonetheless and so quite naturally called her cousin who was a nursing student a few hours before calling the Police. The Student in turn, quite naturally, performed a ‘rape examination’ digitally as we had just discovered and the Student felt that Momma was ‘probably right’. My partner stared at her blankly while he drank this in, holding up a large hand to indicate ‘Silence’, and I could only nod to feign understanding as I backed away, my left arm held across my chest, my right hand caressing my chin.
It was at this moment that I looked across the yard fully expecting frogs and loaves of bread to rain from the sky, when I saw two teenage girls walking a dog on a leash down the center of the Avenue. What happened next was completely my fault because due to my distraction, I had momentarily forgotten that not only was I in East Lake--I was in a section of it known as ‘Black Bottom*’.
The girls were white, in good health, and wearing clothes within two years of being ‘trendy’. To counter this, their dog was walking with a pogo-like hop because its front left paw was broken back at the equivalent of its wrist and was walking on the bloody end of its long bone, punctuated by a coat of both fresh and coagulated blood that had spread a few inches up from the gory base. It had bled enough to spread to the right paw as well, and the normal paw stood in stark contrast to its mangled twin, making it look all the worse. The girls waved to me as they walked past, and I told them to stop. “Come here”, I said.
I wasn't so much worried about the tuna as I was the pork rib. This was unusual given the relatively uncooked nature of the Ahi, but the pork tenderloin had been in the refrigerator for twice as long, and it brought me back to a Bad Experience from several years ago which involved a bucket and a commode used in tandem for the better part of a day. Oh...that devil Pork.
"Hell with it." I ate them both.
The meal before had been twelve hours prior, and its memory brought a smile. I had been sitting across from two Destroyer Classes, and they were laughing. It was cold enough outside to freeze shallow puddles of water, but they sat in short sleeves with tiny beads of sweat forming across their shaved heads; Destroyers ran hot, and they tended to be miserable in even average room temperatures.
We rarely had a chance to dine with one another as a team, and spirits were high. There was a Fast Attack sitting to my left, and a well-liked supervisor across from us--a Fast Attack Class himself. These were the most common now, a sign of changing budget and political climates in which the smaller, faster models were more cost effective and Politically Correct. They were numerous and lithe--they could engage from long range, and had high energy levels. Their drawbacks however were their difficulty in subduing what they caught, and they had wildly short attention spans--but they couldn't do much damage to their customers, and the Administrators liked this. The Destroyers on the other hand weren't as effective from a distance, but when they were close they were both as effective at stopping a situation before it started as they were at ending it in a Precedent Setting splash of blood and bone. Because of their more plodding nature and metabolism, they also made the best investigators...but they were a dwindling breed, once hired in great numbers for their ability to solve problems with a ham-sized fist, and now avoided because of this same thing. It was a cyclical hiring cycle, and we were on the downward trend of the Heavies, and it made me sad. They were magnificent to see at work, as is any force of nature.
I myself was a Cruiser Class, and we all worked well together in any combination. The Destroyers ranged from 300 to 400 lbs., Cruisers in the 200 range, and the Fast Attacks went from 140 to 180 tops. Cruisers were plentiful as well, and while they weren't as expert as the opposite ends of the spectrum, they were proficient at both and thus worked well with either.
We sat and ate and laughed, until a silence befell us as we watched the cook being escorted down the aisle past us towards the bathroom, shivering and sweating with fever. We looked from our empty plates to the cook, and back again; a price of eating in Eden. We departed.
The next call for service was at a local Roach Motel directly off the Boulevard of Broken Dreams; a vagrant had kicked in a door to find a warm shelter for the night for himself and his dog. He was passive, and we all sat around trying to figure out what to do with him. It wasn't a residential burglary because it was unoccupied, but it wasn't quite criminal trespass either. There was vandalism, sure, but the owner wasn't eager to leave the desk to sign for misdemeanor warrants. As we sat and debated the finer parts of law, the mans starving dog strolled across the room to the kitchen dinette where it sniffed a pile of its own feces deposited hours earlier, and began to swallow it down for lack of any other sustenance at the moment. The indigent man called out the emaciated dogs name to distract it from its crude meal, and at the sound of its name we silently agreed to let them both go and prepare for the next call--no good possibly coming from this.
The dog's name, of course, was "Lucky".
The day rolled on, wrecks, reports, revulsion, the usual. Two o’clock was approaching though, and it was time to start mapping out the remainder of the shift to avoid a Late Call. It was as much a part of the job as stomach lining deficiencies, but just as difficult to ignore. My partner had landed a child rape so I decided to help him. Between the two of us, we’d be out on time, or at least one of us would.
The divorce was going poorly. Oh—they hadn’t been married, but it’s an abstract thought in these geographies. The father was staying across the state line in Ringgold with his new package family and had dropped the daughter off back in Eden with the Baby’s Momma, and Momma had decided that the two year old had been molested somehow. She was unable to articulate how she felt this, but was convinced nonetheless and so quite naturally called her cousin who was a nursing student a few hours before calling the Police. The Student in turn, quite naturally, performed a ‘rape examination’ digitally as we had just discovered and the Student felt that Momma was ‘probably right’. My partner stared at her blankly while he drank this in, holding up a large hand to indicate ‘Silence’, and I could only nod to feign understanding as I backed away, my left arm held across my chest, my right hand caressing my chin.
It was at this moment that I looked across the yard fully expecting frogs and loaves of bread to rain from the sky, when I saw two teenage girls walking a dog on a leash down the center of the Avenue. What happened next was completely my fault because due to my distraction, I had momentarily forgotten that not only was I in East Lake--I was in a section of it known as ‘Black Bottom*’.
The girls were white, in good health, and wearing clothes within two years of being ‘trendy’. To counter this, their dog was walking with a pogo-like hop because its front left paw was broken back at the equivalent of its wrist and was walking on the bloody end of its long bone, punctuated by a coat of both fresh and coagulated blood that had spread a few inches up from the gory base. It had bled enough to spread to the right paw as well, and the normal paw stood in stark contrast to its mangled twin, making it look all the worse. The girls waved to me as they walked past, and I told them to stop. “Come here”, I said.
posted by Longshot! [Sane] at 6:32 AM
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